The few Englishmen who are making a more or less regular habit of serious mountaineering on ski are not among the veterans of summer mountaineering, and the leaders of summer mountaineering have not yet learned to ski. Abroad, the leaders of summer mountaineering have welcomed ski-ing as a key to their mountains in winter; but the many leaders of English mountaineering still argue that skis should not be used in the High Alps, on the ground that they afford facility for venturing on slopes and into places where the risk of avalanches is extreme. On the Continent thousands of runners demonstrate in the most effective manner that mountaineering on ski has come to stay. It is consoling to reflect that English ski-runners are prepared to work out the peculiar problems of their craft with or without the help of summer mountaineers. Of course, both ski-ing and summer mountaineering would be strengthened by an alliance, and ski-runners can best learn the rules of the glacier world in winter from those mountaineers who combine a knowledge of the summer Alps with some experience of winter conditions and a mastery of ski-ing. For the moment, such teachers must be looked for in the ranks of continental mountaineers. CHAPTER X THE ALPS IN LITERATURE The last chapter has brought the story of mountaineering up to modern times, but, before we close, there is another side of Alpine exploration on which we must touch. For Alpine exploration means something more than the discovery of new passes and the conquest of virgin peaks. That is the physical aspect of the sport, perhaps the side which the average climber best understands. But Alpine exploration is mental as well as physical, and concerns itself with the adventures of the mind in touch with the mountains as well as with the adventures of the body in contact with an unclimbed cliff. The story of the gradual discovery of high places as sources of inspiration has its place in the history of Alpine exploration, as well as the record of variation routes too often expressed in language of unvarying monotony.